By Tim Garrett: Linking Wealth, Energy Demand, CO2 and Climate Change

Tim Garrett is the scientist with the best understanding of the relationship between energy and the economy, which means he has the best understanding of what can and cannot be done to mitigate the climate change threat.

It is now generally accepted that a 5 degree rise in temperature will collapse civilization. At our current economic growth rate we can expect 5 degrees in 50 or 60 years from now. The only way to avoid this is to collapse civilization now.

I doubt there are solutions but if there are solutions we won’t get at them by imagining fairy tales like improved efficiency and renewable energy.

We need to start thinking now about the most humane way to deal with a collapsing civilization because we know from history that our tendency is to not behave well in such situations.

Interviewer: Why is your work so unknown?

Garrett: Humans have a deep-seated need for optimism and a belief that solutions exist.

The $64k question is can anyone figure out how to make the people who DON’T get it understand before it’s too late to prevent the worst outcome? People who find this and similar blogs are generally in agreement when they arrive. Thinking mass-enlightenment is even possible seems like another branch of denial.

Evidence of actual change would be something like sudden global adoption of serious birth control, or even something relatively passive, like turning one’s bloody engine off when surfing the Net in a parking lot. You can barely get most people to even think about these things (at least Americans).

My main form of hope echoes what the Taylor character said in POTA (’68) about something better than Man somewhere in the universe. “Has to be!”

Denial is the lock that needs to be picked, but picking a lock that no one can see is impossible. I’ve had very little success at getting even aware doomers to see the lock. Maybe I’m wrong and the lock does not exist. Or maybe the lock is so strong that only a very few mutants are able to see it. I’m thinking about this and will be writing on it soon.

In case anyone needs evidence that Garrett is correct, here is a very nice analysis country by country of what the Paris Climate Agreement promises will mean for CO2 emissions, assuming they meet their commitments, which historically no country has.

“What’s the sum of the bottom lines for the world’s top ten CO2 emitters (less the USA)? At best, no significant reduction in global CO2 emissions. And when we add all the other countries whose INDCs hide an emissions increase behind a mythical decrease tied to a business-as-usual scenario we find emissions continuing to rise. The UN’s official estimates show global CO2 equivalent emissions increasing through at least 2030 even in the unlikely event all of the 174 countries that submitted INDCs (who collectively account for 88% of global CO2 emission; the USA accounts for the rest) meet their targets.”

In case you’re wondering about my admired enlightened Canada led by the juvenile pop star Trudeau, we fare no better than the rest.

“Even if Canada meets its target global CO2 equivalent emissions will be cut by only about 0.3% below current levels.”

You see, the universe is governed by the laws of thermodynamics, and the idiots running our countries have never heard of thermodynamic laws, and even if they studied them, they would deny them, because citizens won’t even consider making do with less and having fewer children, because everyone denies the gravity of our situation, because denial made us human.

Thanks again – we can only do what we can do in trying to get the message of our dire climate situation out, the more this information is shared and consumed the greater the possibility of action being taken, in whatever form that may be.

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Favorite Quotes

For explaining why humans are odd
To Varki and Brower we applaud
A great mystery they solved
With denial we evolved
And created the Higgs, overshoot, and God

Denial not only makes us believe in god, it is god, because denial created us, and denial may destroy us.

The human brain, the God it believes in, and the overshoot it enabled and denies, all resulted from the same improbable genetic adaptation that occurred about 100,000 years ago.

Denial is the reality that must be most aggressively denied to avoid collapsing the house of cards that keeps us functioning.

The most amazing thing about human overshoot is that we do not discuss it.

You know you are in trouble when reduced CO2 emissions from an economic collapse caused by low-cost oil depletion is not sufficient to prevent civilization collapse from climate change caused by previously emitted CO2.

Our only choices are do we want to fall from a higher elevation later, or climb down from a lower elevation sooner?

Things that can’t continue usually stop too late.

Truth is like poetry and most people hate poetry.

All 8 billion of us owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains; 6 billion of us also owe our existence to nitrogen fertilizer created from natural gas by Haber-Bosch factories.

While it digs its own grave, all the mind can do is entertain fantasies and create excuses.

When the only paying job in town is sawing off the branch which you are sitting on, you….saw away! You might refuse to saw and hang yourself from that branch, but the end is the same anyway, and that option is much less fun. (Cynic @Megacancer)

It is remarkable that a brain emerged from a cloud of hydrogen and figured out the laws of physics that governed, and possibly made inevitable, its own creation and destruction.

We have met the oblivious and they are us.

All 8 billion of us originated from one small tribe in Africa about 100,000 years ago that gave birth to a child with an improbable mutation for a more powerful brain that denied reality. The other tribes were soon toast and we took over the planet. We’re all close cousins. I love you all. Except the deniers.

Meaning comes from understanding why we can understand there is no meaning.

Way too many smart people with big reputations are wrong about everything that matters. Something’s gonna happen that gives them an excuse not to have to admit they were in denial.

One of the most, if not the most, precious and rare things in the universe is the human brain. We have a cosmic obligation to use it and to confirm it works.

Fire to cooking to intelligence to denial to god to plotting to capital punishment to self-domestication to Apollo 11 to 7 billion too many.